May 31, 2010

There was too much clutter in the loading shack -- such as hundreds of .30-06 cases and oddball .308 bullets -- old 220 -grain round nose fmj's that may well be .30-03 pulls. Cleaned up and loaded ahead of (n) grains of 4350 they will fly at just under 2500 fps and strike terror into the hearts of the not-quite deceased who, the movies tell me, threaten the world as you know and love it.

If the zombie scare turns out to be just another passing Madness-of-Crowds phenomena, they will still be useful. This load should work well enough to control elephants migrating to my latitude as the globe warms.

May 29, 2010

I've been fat on.38 Special brass and 158-grain RNs for quite a while and finally motivated myself to check that chore off the list yesterday afternoon. The result is 150 rounds of the stuff.

I resolved one quandary on the conservative side. My only primers were magnum, and In a large library here I simply couldn't find data for .38 Special with mags. Since I am something of an old woman about unknown pressure factors, I backed off a tenth of a grain from the a Speer starting load of Unique. They'll be fired for practice and entertainment only from a ported Taurus .357 snubby. Unless, of course, someone makes me an offer I can't refuse for a nice used (Bill) Ruger single action in .357.

A good self-defense shooting "..is one that Mayor Daily can’t prosecute because it will make him look like a bigger dick than we already know he is. "

An armed turd fired twice into the home of an 80-year-old man, his 83-year-old wife, and their 12-year-old great-grandson. The homeowner fired one round and the late Mr. Anthony Nelson, burglar, collapsed, leaving behind a voluminous rap sheet.

Mayor Daley told reporters he didn't know if he'll order the states attorney to charge the army veteran with violating Windy laws requiring you Chicagoans to submit to any armed thug who has a yen for what's yours and -- most particularly -- making fighting back a a serious crime.

If northern Illinois libertarians are looking for a little community service project, how about a bake sale? The proceeds to replace the homeowner's pistol, which the cops assuredly confiscated. Oh, and also to replace the well-expended cartridge.

A friend is commiserating with me as I bitch about conditions in Mexico, a place I once loved. I doubt I'll ever again feel comfortable in the camper pulled into a pretty beach cove on Carmen Island or a wide spot in the road a hundred miles south of Ensenada.

The dopers and suppliers of dopers have turned us all into collateral damagees. Perhaps it's time to listen again to our other friend, Travis McGee

"The only possible solution to this deadly trade is to ignore it. Legalize it along with marijuana. Then the infrastructure will sag and collapse. It will no longer be fashionable. Street dealers will no longer hustle new customers on high school sidewalks. And men won't die in the squalid massacres...

May 28, 2010

Because I watch little electrical teevee I'm in debt to my friend Alan of one of the New England commissariats for word that Lt. John W. Finn, USN, (ret.) died yesterday. On Dec. 7, 1941, he left his wife's bed in Kanoehe to rush to the sound of guns at the Naval Air station.

Then-CPO Finn picked up a machine gun (presumably a Browning .30), carried it to an exposed spot on the air strip, and blazed away at Jap raiders. He was wounded several times over the course of a long battle, He survived hospitalization, and, on Sept. 15, 1942, Admiral Chester Nimitz pinned the Medal of Honor on him.

Last night, on ABC teevee, John tells me, George Stephanopolis (I'm too intellectual to be in politics.) reported that he was cited for "fighting back at the Kamikazes attacking Pearl Harbor."

EDIT: Adding that Lt. Finn was the last surviving MOH winner from Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

American stock futures soared for a little while this morning, then fell back when the government reported unemployment still exists and that its first figures on economic growth (Jan-Mar) were screwy.

As we all know, the M1 Carbine is a sloppy WW2 make-do, a substitute for the pistol and designed to permit the untrained citizen soldier to inconvenience the enemy to a slightly greater degree than permitted by his 1911A1 skills.

Ergo this group could not possibly have been fired by my friend Ken from a run-of-the-mill GI carbine a couple of months ago, five shots at some 35 yards, standing, leaning on a tractor tire, on a cold day.

The aiming mark is 1 3/4 inches. The group measures 5/8. I don't know the ammo, but we usually grab a handful from which ever can is closest.

I would claim this target as my own, but sometimes Ken reads this crap.

The latest news from Ruger is that the same top-notch engineering and quality control that went into the LCPs and SR9s now may infect the LCR . Like its black plastic sibs it is proving itself capable of surprise, namely strewing gun parts and shards of cartridges, over a wide area.

Full disclosure: I have personal beef with this company. After months of trying to get some one's attention to a badly botched safety conversion of a three-screw, I finally tore the thing down and fixed it myself. It is still tough to get over the fact that the returned Single Six was accompanied by a signed statement that a certified technician had test fired the weapon and found it flawless. Could the lack have been in me for being unable to cock the hammer without multiple tries and jiggling the cylinder and trigger? That it wouldn't lock up when cocked? That the trigger would only randomly release the hammer? Mind you, this was out of the box, and many weeks worth of emails to Ruger were rewarded with silence.

My Ruger disgust goes deeper -- to the LCP fiasco, the SR9 recalls, and now the case of the exploding plastic wheel gun. As an RGR stockholder I watched the company being delivered into the hands of the MBA marketing shamans who may never have fired anything more lethal than an Andre cork. They looked around, saw that other gun companies had proved black was beautiful, or at least profitable, and started ordering vats of the plastic crap while their interns researched abbreviated time-to-market possibilities.

The result is exploding guns, and, quite probably, a corporate decision that it is cheaper to get sued a few times and to spend more on public relations than it is to build proud firearms.

For decades I was a Ruger addict. Getting over it requires a 12-step program, including dumping the last of the RGR stock. Who the Hell wants to own stock in -- or a gun built by -- the new Lorcin of the firearms industry?

The process is much like watching a once beautiful and faithful wife go emotionally awry and wind up down at a Scully Square corner, desperately motioning "c'mon" at slowly passing cars.

May 22, 2010

Josh is five, and the day before his kindergarten graduation he and some buddies found a pocket knife under a bush on their way to school. He stuck it in his backpack, thought better of it, and left the knife in a park.

Principal Chris Lineberry of Queen Creek, Arizona then spent the rest of the day wiggling around, trying to evade blame for a stupid act of biblical scale. He finally relented, apologized, and allowed as how Josh could go ahead and graduate with this class.

We send our kids to school so that they may sit at the feet of wise educators, don't we?

May 21, 2010

Experts like Soros and Volcker have proven themselves full of gobshittery before, not to mention being part of the establishment which got us into the current economic mess. So it is just for what it may be worth that I cite their most recent rendition of, "Holy Libido, Romulus. This really is the Decline and Fall."

Their gloom probably accounts for some part of today's panicky pre-market business reporting which includes:

2. Find and fire the certified idiots in your circle of advisers. I speak particularly of the guy who told you it would be okay to have your victory bash in a members-only country club.

3. Shut up until...

4. ... you have a better grasp of the power of the symbolic. You don't look into the red light lens and start staggering around on a simple -- if "gotcha" -- question about how you might have voted on a the public accommodations section of the 60s civil rights laws.

I and some fellow libertarian types understood your agonizingly strained guns-in-bars analogy, but a million Kentucky voters wondered what the holy Hell you were talking about.

Here is a principled answer to questions about how you might have voted on racial rights during the LBJ/MLK reign:

"I don't think anyone can honestly say how he might have voted on anything 45 years ago. He would have been a different person then, affected by a different upbringing, a different culture, a different understanding of how a society should organize itself,

"But I will say that ending racial discrimination in voting rights was a decision we should still cherish and which was something like a century overdue when it was signed.

"The public accommodations laws of the same era raised different questions about how far government may intrude into strictly private affairs of business men and women. But for nearly a half-century they have been settled law of our Union, and if anyone thinks I am going to go to Washington and try to re-segregate the lunch counters, that person doesn't know Rand Paul."

The general idea, Dr. Paul, is to get elected. You don't need to shed your principles. You do need to brush the stray wookie hairs from your collar.

"Our experience leads us to advise the public that everyone lives in a floodplain," said Louis Botta, federal coordinating officer for FEMA.

About three sentences later, FEMA says:

FEMA statistics show that homes in a floodplain are 26 times more likely to incur damage from a flood than from a fire during a 30-year mortgage.

Okay Louis, if "everyone" lives in a flood plain, to what are you comparing "homes in a floodplain?"

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This is the sort of thing you run into when your Podunk city council unanimously passes an ordinance to apply for federal flood insurance, a FEMA operation.

Our local gentlemen didn't seem to have a very good sense of what they were voting for, so I thought it would be a kindness to point them to a fact or two. The most disheartening one is that bedding down with the Feds adds one more complete layer of building, zoning, and land-use laws to what ever such gobshitery has been dreamed up and enacted by the local authoritarians.

I may or may not persevere in the research. Reading stuff written in Washington makes my head ache and embeds in my butt a deep sense of fatigue.

May 18, 2010

Yep, I put on my UDT gear, slipped the M3 grease gun into a plastic bag and hit that Vietnam beach like Errol Flynn jumping Joan Blondell. Man, you shudda seen me when I....

Oh. Wait a minute. I misspoke a little there. It was actually a beach north of San Diego and what I really had was scout knife and a fifth of Three Feathers in a brown paper bag. But, I mean, I wasn't lying at first. Honest. Just misspoke. By, like, accident, y'know.

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Blumenthal, you damned liar. With any decency at all you would at least refrain from insulting our intelligence with this "I misspoke" crap. You lied your ass off to try to look like a USMC hero and you got caught. Would God I had the power to lock you in a room with a squad of KheSanh survivors.

I was trained in a remote area of the the Great Plains of North America by a uniformed paramilitary organization emphasizing survivalism, preparedness, and extreme patriotic and religious values.

At the age of 11 the indoctrination began including weapons training. And damned if New Jovian Thunderbolt didn't just now catch me up by discovering the lethal weapons content in what appears to be a simple camping manual.

May 17, 2010

...being, Gentle Reader, a sort of post script to the previous post which detailed no more than a simple refurbishment of a canoe paddle.

One thing led to another, and I am finally, at this late hour, inside the house and preparing my supper. In the rear view mirror of the day is a second paddle refinished, a fresh set of shelves for the storage closet built, rewiring the new drum sander, and a small beginning on some overdue lawn care.

This sort of thing must be controlled. When a man sets out to loaf the day away, he ought to have the character to follow through.

A non-gun auction yesterday left me with some new tool-toys and a slightly worn Feather canoe paddle long enough for my 6' 1".* I decided to add a metal tip to the paddle, the better to misuse it pushing off rocks and so forth.

It didn't take too long with thin aluminum, copper nails,** and a half-ounce of Gorilla Glue. That leads to today's tip: When you get the Gorilla Glue all over your fingers -- and you will -- you must instantly wash your hands with gasoline, followed by an SAE10-30 rinse. A few minutes later you can use soap and water. Failure to heed this advice will result in social embarrassment for several days. That stuff is more tenacious than epoxy.

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* Harder than it sounds. You want a canoe paddle that reaches from your toes to your nose. Most of them you find in the racks are too short.

** Yes, I know about electrolysis. Three coats of varnish should take care of it.

May 15, 2010

With dry skies and a visible sunrise at last, it became time to get back into the habit of personally supervising my portion of the county. (The patrol vehicle was the minivan, preferred to the F150 as less intimidating. This is in accord with modern and sensitive policing practices.)

No serious threat level exists in this watershed at this point in time, so I settled on the mere SW59, positioned on the passenger seat and hidden under a WalMartflyer. I'm CCWed, but why let the subject even arise if I happen to stop and chat with someone through the driver-side window?

I am pleased to report that at 0706 local, all is secure and no ammunition was expended. However I observed evidence of a recent ecofelony:

Our DNR has created a monumental ugliness just down the road.

A beautiful stand of sumac there has irritated official state envirocrats ever since we gave the land to the DNR for a park*.

The DNR first claimed sumac was not a native species. That was hooted down by a panel of experts -- farmers, grandfathers, Boy Scouts, and several ordinary citizens with access to Google.

The DNR shifted to a posture that sumac is an "aggressive" plant which stymies its plan to create an "oak savanna" on the plot. There were other verbal ploys to justify the primary point: me government; me want.

Sometime in the past few days the DNR brought in a bush hog, and what was once a fine stand of natural wildlife cover now looks like something the Ax Men would get fined for. I suspect the next chapter is planting -- at huge expense -- some burr oak seedlings.

Lacking the red sumac berries which they loved, the dear will promptly eat the oaks.

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*And I mean "we." The former owner of this c. 20 acre plot was about to create a sub-division. Most of us didn't want ticky-tacky there. A local rich guy kicked in a hefty sum. The rest of us donated what we could. We got it bought, then passed it on to the state of Iowa to add to the existing adjacent park. There's every chance the state of Iowa will give our heirs cause to wonder why we bothered.

May 14, 2010

This is Jessica's day, the end of the voyage, round-the-world, under sail, alone, and unaided.

We need to ignore the elected nonentities and media hand wringers who said her dream should be outlawed, that it doesn't amount to much anyway (now that it is successful), and that she's a headstrong kid with no respect for authority.

Her Aussie -- and international -- detractors should shut the Hell up and concentrate on organizing a giant communal diaper and step-in wash.

Suppose someone proposed a national policy requiring payday loan shysters to elect, by secret ballot, one representative annually. Said representative would be publicly horse whipped as a gesture of disapproval of the slimy business.

Okay. I would oppose it, but it would be a damned close call. The market justifies all sorts of bottom-feeding by the clever who prowl schools of suckers. That doesn't mean we have to like it, only that we keep our controlling mitts to ourselves.

Such elementary reasoning is beyond the Des Moines city council creatures who decided it is their business to control that business. Through the zoning laws, and here I append one of the four exclamation points I permit myself annually. !

Any zoning regulation is Constitutionally questionable, but used for things like banning a nuclear reactor next door to your neighborhood cathedral it probably can be drafted to a point of general acceptability.

Zoning decrees to stifle perfectly legal operations which happen to offend official sensibilities are just Pelosi pleasers, carrying all of the good sense of the current Congressional stampede to control every aspect of the banking and credit card rackets.

And about those official sensibilities. We're referring here to that sensibility which permits the office holder to go before his voters and bleat that he has ended "predatory lending. "

What he has done, of course, is eliminate one kind of credit, sending the only citizens likely to use it into the alleys where Vito gives you the loan and sends a couple of baseball bats around to collect the vig.

My first formal photojournalism course was taught by St. Donald Wooley, then of the University of Iowa, later a professor at West Virginia U.

He had two rules chipped in stone. (1) If you miss the first day of laboratory procedure instruction you are dropped from the course. (2) Anyone handing in a photograph of a cat or kitten automatically failed the course.

The latter policy was routinely appealed by undergraduates who argued passionately that it stifled their creativity. The deans routinely upheld Professor Wooley for the possibly mythical but still cherished reason that he told them the first time: "If I have to look at one more (effing) saccharine cat picture I'll regurgitate all over the front row of coeds, then I will resign."

Turk has an item on the latest Sodom-on-Lake Michigan area gun-buyback. The gist is that taxpayers spent their money on about 200 non-working junkers with about the same crime potential as black board eraser.

Most of what the pictures show are unidentifiable long guns, and I doubt many are worth the $75 public bounty as potential working weapons.

But there's another element here. Just suppose one of them is a clapped out Winchester 74. Firing pin price-- $30. Magazine tube assembly about the same. Sights about ten bucks each. Or suppose a Remington 514, stock value at least $40. Etcetera.

And do you suppose there was anyone at the church there glancing at the stuff as it came in to check for old Redfield receiver sights? Marble screw-ons? Tang sights?

It is a sort of cash-for-clunkers disaster, huge amounts of benign value heading straight for the Burns Harbor blast furnaces with no conceivable redeeming public service rendered.

If I had a Huffington Post account I could say this there for the giggles inherent in being told that Redfield peeps can transform any weapon into a sniper rifle capable of killing children at a half-mile.

But the writer and editor ought to be sentenced to a half-dozen paint balls to the bare butt for leaving the most important fact to the last paragraph:

"At the same time the U.S. Federal Reserve reopened currency swap lines with several central banks in hopes of assuring markets of dollar liquidity, and the European Central Bank said it would buy government debt to steady investor nerves. A number of European central banks said they had already started. "

Translation: U.S. taxpayers will foot some of the bill. If history is a guide, we will cover most of it, one way or another. Because we are flat broke and because HIsObamaness is deathly afraid a tax hike would further motivate His peasants to wrap torches and sharpen pitch forks, the price you pay to mask the stupidity of EuroSoc will be indirect -- a fresh few tons of fiat dollars further eroding the value of the ones you have.

In return you'll get the warm fuzzy glow that comes from knowing you helped pay for Marshall Plan No. 666. This one follows the Aegean War of 2003-2010, fought by unionized Greek grape leaf packers against the evil forces of The Market.

May 7, 2010

A small addendum to the raisin bran post: I see by the news that yesterday's market fiascoes have led EuroSoc central bankers to promise TWO scoops of money for Greece.

Next up: The same for Portugal, then Spain.

And I simplycannot believe how how silent, how stoic, my Irish brothers of the bog are being as Brussels prints Euros at warp speed for other economic basket cases. What the heck ever happened to the pike upon me shoulder spirit?

May 5, 2010

Gunners and libertarians in this corner of Blogopolis spend a good deal of time in straightforward logical exposition. The object is usually to promote reasonable discussion. But what real chance does logical discourse have in a nation wherein the greatest cereal company, a $13 billion behemoth, found vast new riches in a melodic "Two scoops of raisins in a box of Kelloggs..."?

For 20 years.

Maybe it is better to run around open carrying on the outside of your wookie suit.

In case you haven't noticed, the American equity market is rolling horse apples with its nose this morning. If you did miss that, it may also be news to you that the riotous Greek labor unionists and students, among others, are occupying the Acropolis. Pericles weeps.

Their two-tiered beef is that the rest of the world is loaning them too little and that the loans will go to reduce earlier debt rather than buy more gummint freebies for unionists and students, among others.

The upshot is that investors are beginning to wonder even harder if Greece and, by extension, every other pissant socialist "democracy" in Europe really care about meeting obligations. And the result of that is that investors will close their purses.

Just mentioning this for those of my friends who admire EuroSoc, including my friendly President who wants to take us there.

It isn't that there was too little to do last weekend. A whim became a compulsion, however, to toss a small and ancient .22 semi into the truck and go make noise at the range.To Hell with adjusting sights, saving brass, or taking care not to scratch the iron.

I can't recall a time there hasn't been at least one RST4 kicking around the place. This one is a veteran, here since the middle '90s and, curse me, shot too seldom.

We took care of that Saturday afternoon, doing about 250 rounds worth of damage to the bulk pack of Winchesters and, in the process, entertaining some youngish beginners. To wit:

Note the hole in the12 gauge hull. It is not posted as a brag, rather as a miss and a lead-in to one of the more entertaining facts in the world of shooting. Me and Roy Rogers know that if you want to make a bean can jump impressively, miss it. Hit the dirt just under it.

I shot some holes in paper, then made a sieve out of an energy drink can. Tossing it in the trash can I noticed the shotgun empties. Heh heh heh. Three of them were lined up on the ground at 50 feet, two of them popped high in first three shots, and I heard a sort of "wow" from the kids watching the presumptuous old guy. This molestation of AA empties entertains me and maybe them through about three more magazines.

The youths thought I was hitting the little things, and of course I am not the kind to diminish Faith. When I cleaned up after myself I took one of the shells that had been holed three or four times (misses,remember) and accidentally left it on the bench for their future amusement.

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One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent. -- H.L. Mencken

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...the Constitution was made to guard thepeople against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." Daniel Webster

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EMAIL --alongfordmick(at)yahoo(dot)com

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Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty – and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies."– H.L. Mencken,